GABBs - Reusable Geospatial Data Analysis Building Blocks for Science Gateways

Science gateways have gained wide adoption in recent years as an effective platform for a lower barrier entry to computational resources, research collaboration, dissemination of scientific data, applications and publications, online education, and community engagement. Although multiple portal frameworks and middleware toolkits exist to facilitate the development of a science gateway, the task of bringing data and tools online into a science gateway environment is still daunting for domain science users. In this paper, we describe GABBs, a National Science Foundation funded project that aims to reduce this obstacle by delivering reusable software building blocks for geospatial data management and analysis based on the HUBzero portal platform. The main components of GABBs include a geospatial data management system named iData, libraries for easy creation of geospatial data analysis tools hosted in the gateway, GeoBuilder for creating GIS-enabled data exploration tools without programming, and general purpose tools for geospatial data processing and visualization. GABBs also provides the software for linking these components/functions into dynamic workflow pipelines. The open source GABBs software has been deployed on MyGeoHub and utilized in several domain applications. Keywords—GABBs; DIBBS; science gateway; HUBzero; building blocks; geospatial data